stay quiet in the kitchens, but I followed one of the servants to deliver tea, and when she walked through the gardens I . . .” She struggled again for how to express the feeling of that morning and was stunned to feel tears burning at the corners of her eyes.
She dipped her chin back into her chest. “I’d never seen anything like that before. The pure beauty of roses speckled with dew waiting to be taken by the sun. That kind of thing doesn’t exist for people like me. And I guess I just wanted to remember what it was like to stand in the garden that morning, longing to cast off my clothes and roll across the lawn.”
Her cheeks blazed pink as she realized that perhaps she’d spoken too much, and when she risked a glance up at the Oglethorpe boy she noticed his face was a bit flushed as well.
She waited for him to say something, to demand a deeper truth, but he was silent as he seemed to consider her story.
One by one he plucked the petals from the rose he’d taken from her and placed them in the cupped palm of her hand. When he was done, he cast the thorny stem back into the thicket and curled her fingers closed.
“Don’t let my mother find out,” he told her. His touch lingered longer than necessary, his eyes darting around her face. Then he cleared his throat and strode away, his shiny boots crunching along the path.
Every day Frankie showed up to work at the Oglethorpe house, it was the same ritual: rough hands stripped her bare and pushed her toward a room with a large, overflowing tub. She was given five minutes on a good day but more like three when things got busy.
Frankie was never the first to arrive for work and so by the time it was her turn to wash, the water would have taken on a bit of murk and sheen. While the rooms upstairs were stocked with soft soaps subtly perfumed, the help were given a cup of gritty detergent that smelled of pine straw and licorice.
From the first day, Frankie learned to be quick and thorough scrubbing herself. If the house manager caught a whiff of unpleasant odor wafting from any employee, they’d be reprimanded and, on subsequent infractions, dismissed. The Mistress of Oglethorpe refused to allow a hint of miasma into her home, and since most of the servants lived in the neighborhoods along the swamp, she was diligent about every one of them going through a deep cleaning before being given entrance to the house.
Frankie found that if she washed quickly she could spend the last stolen seconds with her head dipped below water. It was this moment of the day she loved best: when her head slipped under the surface for as many heartbeats as she could bear, and the world fell silent and numb.
Underwater there were no beaked doctors or plague eaters, and she could forget about the night they came for her mother and the fever flush on her sister’s face in the evenings. She didn’t have to worry about the rumors that the doctors were taking healthy people from her neighborhood, somehow causing their monsters to alert on them even though they weren’t ill.
It was in those stolen moments that Frankie allowed herself to imagine a life different from the one she lived. Instead of dirt floors there would be carpets of woolen flowers; instead of plywood walls there would be rows of gilt frames boasting centuries of oil-captured ancestors. Instead of the sickly stench from the swamp there would be the gardens.
And in the gardens there would be the voice. There would be the touch of the boy who cupped his hand around hers, and he would pluck rose petals as he did before, but instead of dropping them into her palm he would brush them over her lips and eyelids and down along the ridge of her throat.
In her imaginings his touch would dip lower, but by this time Frankie’s lungs would be burning and no matter how hard she willed herself to stay below the surface, to keep the daydreams fresh and alive, her body would betray her and force her up for air.
Nothing was ever as acrid as that first lungful just as her lips broke free and the oil-slicked water sloshed around her chin and shoulders.
Even though she’d scrub her skin almost raw with rags, she could always remember the stench of the swamp that clung to everything in her neighborhood: decaying leaves piled upon dead animals and forgotten civilizations buried deep in dirt that had been damp for centuries, slowly churned over by worms and scavengers and steeped by rain that dripped from tree limbs casting everything in perpetual shade that never dried.
It was that smell that brought the fever, the minuscule bits of toxic rot floating in the air, drifting on currents and inhaled through nostrils and mouths to settle in lungs and leach into the bloodstream, touching death to what was left of life.
During her days at the Oglethorpe house, Frankie might smell pure and sweet, but it never lasted. At night the miasma of the swamp would seep into her pores and burrow under her hair as if to claim her and remind her that she was not, nor would she ever be, like the boy she had met in the garden of the Oglethorpe house.
Frankie was never supposed to step foot into the Mistress of Oglethorpe’s personal chambers, but one of the other maids was flushed and didn’t want to risk the chance of being seen and dismissed for the possibility of being sick. As a favor, Frankie offered to fill the rose water carafes and change out the incense burners in the family’s private suites.
She’d understood that the Mistress was out at tea most afternoons, and so Frankie chose that time to sneak up the back stairs and slip through the rooms, her goal to get through the task as quickly and efficiently as possible.
But when she made it to the Mistress’ bedchamber, she let out a soft gasp and could go no farther. The room was teeming with plants, their green leaves crisp and polished and unfurled against the sun streaming through triple sets of double windows. Tendrils and vines crawled up the posters on the bed and gripped the molding along the ceiling.
It was like living in a garden, down under the canopy where light turned green and raw. Frankie felt her lungs relaxing, even her skin delighting in the coolness of the room and the freshness of the air.
Tiny pinpricks of flowers dotted the foliage, and the scent of gardenias and tea olives was overwhelming, almost making Frankie drowsy with their headiness. She wanted to collapse on the bed with its thick down comforters and freshly pressed sheets and just spend the rest of eternity inhaling deeply.
But in the distance a cannon boomed, clearing the air along the lanes of the districts between the hills and the swamps, and the sound of it snapped Frankie out of her reverie. Reluctantly, she returned to her task, dribbling the fresh rose water as slowly as possible to prolong her exposure to the room.
There had been a time when Frankie had been brave. But now she barely found the courage to linger in the Mistress’ bedchamber and dream.
Over the next few days Frankie invented a thousand excuses to go back to the family suites, but none of them came to fruition. She offered to take other maids’ duties on top of her own, to swap out chores—anything—but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t finagle a way upstairs.
She’d been relegated to the washhouses and kitchens, which meant she spent the day bathed in heat and sweat. And once one had enough sweat, that person wasn’t allowed inside the main house for fear of the stench.
Frankie felt she might go insane if she didn’t see that room again. The memory of those few moments breathing in the freshest air she’d ever imagined and being surrounded by the bright green of plants had become almost an obsession for her. A craving for it had burrowed deep under her skin.
The next morning she arrived early for duty, so early that the sky was still black and the water for the servant baths retained a bit of warmth. After she’d scrubbed the smell of the swamp from her skin, she grabbed a stack of fresh linens and shuffled them up the back stairs.
The only light came from the scented oil sconces along the walls, their flames turned dim, and Frankie kept herself to the shadows as she crept toward the Mistress’ chambers. The Mistress would be asleep still—Frankie knew this—but she just needed to peek into the room and inhale the freshness of flowers.
As she drew closer, the sound of the Mistress’ snoring filtered through the air. Frankie bit her lips, cursing the
